Merchandising

It would have been difficult to come away uninspired by Patrick Connolly’s keynote speech at the Annual Catalog Conference in Chicago in May. The executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Williams-Sonoma offered some sage advice for his fellow catalogers. First, don’t think of yourself as a cataloger but as a brand. And, he noted, people define your brand as much by what you sell as what you don’t sell. He shook his head at an example from one of his competitors in the kitchen marketplace: It’s begun to offer PDAs and personal groomers in its catalog. That led to Connolly’s second insight:

In today’s hotly competitive retail marketplace, private-label products let catalogers set themselves apart from other merchants. “You can gain a competitive advantage if you’re smart about your product development,” asserts Karen Scott, founder of One Step Ahead and Leaps and Bounds, two catalogs of children’s merchandise. For Scott, that meant coming up with some new and original product concepts and getting them to market before the big retail chains. “The mass merchants have entered our market,” she says. “They’ve learned to copy goods and sell them cheaply. By designing some of our own products, it gives us back our competitive edge.”

What do companies like L.L. Bean, Coldwater Creek, Lands’ End, J. Jill, Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Ross-Simons, Pottery Barn, The Sharper Image, Cabela’s and Frontgate have in common? They all have a clear merchandise vision, says Chuck Howard, president of Howard Consulting, a Rockville, MD-based catalog consulting firm. “A merchandising vision is simply an understanding of the customer and his or her lifestyle,” he explains. But, according to Howard, it is one of the most difficult topics for catalogers to grasp. Most don’t truly understand the importance of merchandising, he laments. While numbers are the foundation of good merchandise planning, a lot of people

Merchants are born, not made, says Jennifer Anderson Benevides, merchandising manager at Sturbridge Yankee Workshop, a Portland, ME-based catalog of country-inspired home furnishings. A former apparel buyer for a retailer, Benevides is new to cataloging and is thriving on its multi-faceted challenges. She recently spoke with Alicia Orr Suman, freelance writer and the former editor in chief of Catalog Success. Catalog Success: How did you get involved in catalog merchandising? Benevides: I started at a retailer called Anderson-Little in Massachusetts right out of college. Though it’s no longer in business, it was a great training ground. It was a national company that sold

We had finished analyzing the catalog’s product sales. The unit sales, revenue and square inch reports all pointed to the same conclusions. “The big winners are those cute resin figurines,” I told the catalog’s owner. “Every time you add one, sales go up. You should add more this year. And the big loser is the expensive hand-signed pottery. Those should go.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve decided to discontinue all the resin. I don’t want resin in the catalog anymore.” “But why?” I asked. “Your customers love them.” “They’re tacky. I’d never have them in my house. I’ve signed a contract with the pottery

Inside you’ll find: cost-cutting strategies for your fulfillment operations; how to protect your inventory from internal theft; how to assess your catalog systems options; and how to determine your optimal IT spend. Get Lean Successful cost-cutting strategies for your catalog fulfillment operations. By William J. Spaide Lackluster operating performance in your catalog’s fulfillment operations can result from a combination of factors: poor productivity, inefficient processes, and unanticipated marketing and merchandise results. Failure to identify early warning signs of trouble and, more importantly, not addressing these problems decisively and effectively, are common characteristics of the operational “also-rans.” It all comes down to a

To produce profits, you first must scrutinize overhead expenses. And since payroll often accounts for most overhead expenses, each staff position within your catalog must be justified and optimized. With current trends focused on keeping employment as flat as possible, it may be tempting to either eliminate a merchandise manager’s position or to not add one as your company grows. But I argue that this should be one of the key positions in your company. Remember, you are, after all, a merchant. Your catalog exists to sell products. All the rest of the things you need to do are in support of your

Not many start-up catalogs can boast annual sales de-mand of more than $50 million, a one-year housefile-growth rate of a whopping 126 percent, and more than 300,000 12-month buyers. But that’s just what Crossing Pointe, the newest division of Blair Corp., has so far achieved during its first three and a half years in operation. Crossing Pointe’s mission has been to bring younger, more affluent customers to its 94-year-old parent company, Warren, PA-based Blair Corp. Officials at Blair, a veritable stalwart in the direct mail industry and the eighth largest consumer apparel cataloger in the United States, wanted to broaden their customer base, and

Problem: Before Ward’s Natural Science could expand its catalog operations to the Internet, it needed to develop a central repository for the accompanying data for its more than 18,000 products. Solution: Ward’s installed Pindar Systems’ content management system. Data for all products are now stored in one central database. Results: Ward’s launched an e-commerce site that has resulted in increased overall sales; employees have saved significant time in their data-management processes; and Ward’s was able to reduce two full-time positions. When executives at Ward’s Natural Science decided to expand the catalog operations to the Internet, they knew they’d need one central product database

In times when response rates suffer and average order values decline, earning a profit in cataloging can be more of a challenge than normal. In this environment, your expenses (e.g., marketing costs, overhead, fulfillment) become a larger percentage of sales, thus leaving few, if any, percentage points left for profit. Although there are many things you can do to check overhead expenses and keep marketing costs at a minimum, there’s one line on your profit and loss statement that can have the biggest impact on your ability to make money: cost of goods sold (COGS). Before taking the steps to improve your